I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser?
http://lwn.net/Articles/202780/ Summary: It does not scale. For uniprocessor, it should not make much difference. But reiser3 horribly bogs down on multi-core servers, for example during kernel compiles after a tarball was extracted (which is what happens with `rpmbuild kernel-default.spec`.)
I am one of goofs who is hanging onto Reiser v3.... my excuse is that it seems to survive reboots (intentional or otherwise) a lot more elegantly than ext. That is a bit of a lame excuse I know... My experience with ext dates back to my early days with SUSE (6.x timeframe) when I was doing a lot of booting back and forth between Windows and SUSE. Every 10th boot ext would drop into its sanity check routine and my boot cycle would take what felt like forever while it did a filesystem scan. I also had a lot of crashes and forced reboots and got to know fsck far too intimately. This has put me off using ext on my systems. A few questions... What is the default for ext3 in SUSE? Journal, Ordered or Writeback? What about defragmentation? As far as I know, ext3 cannot be properly defragmented either on the fly or off line. (Also none for Reiser, but I find that Resier tends to stay relatively neat and tidy... for the most part). Is file fragmentation on ext3 something a user needs to think about? Does ext still default to doing a filesystem scan on every 10th or 20th boot? If it does, what do you recommend for computers that are booted up and turned off on a regular basis (like laptops)? I am helping a friend convert his laptop to openSUSE10.2 this weekend... so file system choice is on my mind. Upgrade from ext2 to ext3 to ext4 is not much of an issue so not a reason to choose ext3 here - neither is scalability since it's just a laptop. I need something that will give little trouble with things like sudden unintentional powerdowns - something Reiser usually survives nicely with a journal replay on boot after an uncontrolled shutdown. What can happen with ext3 after an uncontrolled power off? Does it survive as cleanly as Reiser does (usually) or are you usually back to booting a rescue system and forcing an fsck to be able to remount the filesystem? (this is a situation I don't want for this new user if I can avoid it, and was my experience waaaay back when I used ext) C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org